 The spring of 2013 that I took my first trip to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest interactive If you've never been is this giant tech conference in a really cool city Where all of the big names in tech are coming together to show off what they've been working on and there's also this huge convention floor Where you have hundreds of vendors just hanging out swag and trying to generally make a sale Let's be honest for me. It was mostly about the swag It was on this convention floor that I met a woman named Anna And I'm a project manager at a small Washington, DC based agency called three spot Her booth immediately caught my eye Because it had the words fudging care or don't fudging do it and blazoned on a screen They didn't say fudge Something about this resonated with me. Perhaps it was the liberal use of profanity but I stopped to compliment their marketing and I got to talking about Anna about three spot and their mission and They're all about building software with a purpose if you're building something that you don't really care about What's the point in doing it? Three spot intentionally filters some of their client prospects to organizations that are trying to make a positive change in the world Their client roster includes groups like the National Parks Conservation Association National Park Service the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation the ACLU and the Smithsonian Institution I'm guessing you've probably heard of at least one of those Had I not been at South by Southwest on the company's dime and I suppose recently bought a house in Columbus. I Probably would have quit my job right then to move to DC and work for three spot a Large part of my career has been spent on the services side of things you know agencies I've worked for several agencies and dozens of clients many of whom needed modern websites to attract more customers to sell more Stuff One agency I did work for is a fast food company nationally internationally known For their golden arches. I'm not going to name it names here, but I'm pretty sure you know who I'm talking about Advanced slide. Come on ruin the joke timing specifically it was a bunch of regional franchisees that bond or That banded their marketing budgets together So rather than like one or two restaurants going hey, we're over here We were doing work for like 40% of these restaurants in Ohio There were literally nights when I was home late in order to build websites to sell more cheeseburgers I wasn't pushing social causes or or lifesaving medical products or anything I was literally selling cheeseburgers show of hands. How many people here have heard of cheeseburgers before? Oh, you've heard of them wonderful Please go buy cheeseburgers and buy them from this particular big multinational corporation That was the message. I was spending my nights trying to push It brought me to the somewhat nihilistic realization that a good portion of the software that we write is I hate to say it kind of meaningless like super dumb Untold hours pour it into selling a few more cheeseburgers or widgets or whatever Or building an app that does something that nobody in the history of the human race has needed But somebody has money and they think it can make them money. So they're willing to pay you to build it for them Take a moment to let that sink in All of this work all of these hours spent doing something as silly as reminding people that Cheeseburgers are a viable food option Doesn't that piss you off a little bit? Like this is how we're spending our time That's where I was a few years ago, too But then I learned how to find the deeper meaning in the software that I write and that's what I want to talk to you about today If the software is meaningless, we need to either find meaning in what we do or do something that actually matters Let's try to look past the cheeseburger for a moment and Find meaning in what we're doing today If it seems that the software we're building is meaningless Maybe try reframing it spin around a few times stand on your head hop on one foot Whatever you have to do to see that it's not about the cheeseburger. There is no cheeseburger Okay, there is a cheeseburger and it's delicious, but the cheeseburger isn't the point here It's the small franchise owners that we're building software for the the people who are creating jobs They're providing low-cost food opportunities in a community The work I was doing wasn't for the giant multinational company I was working for at the franchise owners the franchise owners who might own one or two restaurants apiece And they've pulled their money together to try to remind their neighbors that yes We're still here sure our food is exactly the same as Thousands of other restaurants across the world and it's crazy and it's over salted and really it's kind of not very good But we the franchise owners we're still here Nutritional deficiencies aside, do you know what kinds of people benefit from fast food being in their communities? To be honest, it's not really me. My wife is very big on on cooking healthy and We have a little kid that she does not want to be a bigger kid that way so I'm not the one hitting from fast food restaurants, but you have lower-income families You have single parents struggling to put a hot meal on the table for their kids you have People who work second or third shifts and they miss out on the traditional restaurants Have you ever tried going out and getting like a nice dinner at two in the morning? Your options are Taco Bell in the waffle house We have the road warriors We have workers who don't have the privilege of a full hour for lunch and they literally just have time to hit a drive-thru We have small-town folks. My wife is from a small town up near Mansfield The nicest restaurants in her town are the fast food places by the highway. It's really kind of depressing We also have the disabled or retired workers that need these jobs Maybe to keep a roof over their heads or maybe just to stop from slowly drifting off in this nility It's really easy to frame fast food It's just cheap greasy food served up by a multi-billion-dollar corporation headed by a literal clown and that's true, too Don't get me wrong But it also represents a source of food a sense of of safety a sense of community for these people that I've named So when I was selling cheeseburgers, I wasn't doing it for the clown I was supporting these small business owners the people they employ and the people who eat there It's not what I personally choose to eat But I realized that I'm fortunate enough to have that choice Let's get away from cheeseburgers for a second because frankly I'm getting hungry and I just had one of the delicious donuts bills Donuts by the way Dayton local. Yes awesome good donuts Maybe you're not building marketing websites, but instead you're building applications for companies You're doing another CRM integration or another crud app because Bill and Brenda in accounting can't Agree on how the inventory spreadsheet should work You may have recently spent six solid months of your life building an application that Only a handful of people will ever see use or even know exists This is my boss guy named Chris lemma And I'm not just name-dropping because like star power in first keynote, but Star power You might know him. He's generally considered a pretty big deal in the WordPress space But besides that he's also a really solid product person and I'm learning a lot working under him a few months ago Chris tweeted this Never forget why people pay for things People pay to solve pain People pay to accelerate a result People pay to skip failure People pay to reach a destination Let's say in a scenario you've spent the last six months of your life building some internal application You've been paid for your time. I mean, I certainly hope you've been paid for the last six months of your life and Sure, only a few people will ever use see or even know about the app that you've built But which of these reasons is the reason that they hired you to do it Do they have a pain point that you help them solve? Was something really error-prone before and now you've put the guardrails in place to make sure that it just works Maybe there was a process that was really slow and it caused them a lot of pain at the end of each month with someone spending Days or weeks compiling numbers for some leadership report and now that process takes seconds rather than days How much time did you just save that person through your work? Did someone invest in you for your knowledge knowing that yeah, I probably could figure this out And then 18 months later, they'd be like, oh, no, I've stressed myself out. I don't know anything. This is terrible And they went no, I'm going to hire the person who knows what they're doing. I'm going to trust them to build it I'm going to pay them to build it and I'm going to have something that I can rely on Or maybe their company needed to get somewhere Did you just replace an old billing system that was storing payment information and securely for instance because I mean I know that's that's a Shocker that there's there are payment systems that store but Can that company now claim PCI compliance does that open up new markets to them new business opportunities? Did your efforts enable those handful of users to do their jobs better therefore moving that whole company forward or Freeing them up to do what they do best My brother is an AV technician at a hospital back home. He and his team are responsible for all of the Teleconferencing equipment all of the projectors and things in this this giant medical campus The number of times he's had to hike like a mile across campus to go help some doctor turn on a projector It's more times than he cares to count, but I want you to remember that the people giving Presentations in hospitals. These aren't usually dumb people. These are often renowned surgeons or doctors or researchers Yeah, they might struggle getting Skype working properly, but as much as I love my brother I can guarantee you I'd rather have them work on me if my appendix were to burst then to have my brother who has no medical training But is really good at computers Operating on me If your job enables other people to do their jobs. Well, you're contributing Sure, he's turning on a projector and to be fair a trained surgeon probably shouldn't have any issues turning on a projector I mean, it's not like it's well surgery but If the act of turning on that projector means that this surgeon can present findings that for instance can help end childhood leukemia The dude you turn on the projector This goes double if you're a manager if you have people working under you Making sure that they see the positive impact of their work how they're contributing to the the larger and greater good That should be one of your top priorities make it easy for them to see How they're helping other people and reinforce that they're not just toiling away at some meaningless task You know working towards some unseen goal People pay to solve pain People pay to accelerate a result People pay to skip failure people pay to reach a destination Which of these are you doing for your clients? Once you're able to reframe what you're working on as Trivial as the work may seem it's possible to find meaning in the otherwise meaningless You're not just writing it to sell more soft or to sell more cheeseburgers your writing software for the people Let's look at the other side What it is as shallow as it seems After all sometimes a cheeseburger is it's really just a cheeseburger You can twist it a hundred different ways, but not Absolutely, everything is going to have some deeper meaning behind it Maybe you're working for a startup who stated mission is to quote get paid and get laid man Nice Worse, maybe you're working for the bad guys if your employer or your clients are trying to sell cigarettes to kids or Restrict access to health care or locking babies in cages. Well It's going to be a lot harder to pinpoint those positive attributes If the work you're doing today isn't helping people or worse It's actively hurting people and what are you doing? If you're not actively making the world a better place with what you're doing or Empowering other people to make progress then it's time to make a change or get out of the game I'd like you to introduce you to a friend and colleague of mine. This is Andrew Norcross Most people just calling Norcross and Norcross here He has what I like to call a strong social conscience If you haven't met him, he's he's covered in tattoos. You can see Millhouse there on his forearm he's a proud Floridian and He can talk your ear off about genres of heavy music that I'm not entirely sure actually exist But he seems really excited. So I just sort of nod my head and go. Oh, yeah. No, they were great All right, so here come the politics and I'm not looking to get into a debate here It's far too early for that find me at the after-party and I'm happy to do this but For those who don't know me Let's just say that I'm not the biggest fan of the current US president or the people he surrounds himself with Yeah, that's that's probably a nice way to put it Anyway in the the summer of 2018 the Trump administration came under fire for their Zero tolerance family separation policy if Families were caught illegally crossing the border into the United States The policy basically stated that children should be separated from the adults that they were traveling with the reasoning from the Trump administration Being something along the lines of if they're afraid to be separated from their families They'll be less likely to attempt to cross something of an oversimplification sure, but let's let's roll with it for now So these children around three thousand that we know of we're separated from their families Of course, you can't just send them back home. They literally just crossed the border with their families So what do you do with a bunch of kids? I mean clearly you lock them in detention centers, right? I mean not like some daycare center like where we send my kid You know, oh go play with the other kids. Well, we process the family now Something more along the lines of fun-sized internment camp Anyway, good people don't abide this kind of injustice Norcross Norcross is good people On a Friday evening a friend of Norcross has reached out and asked him for some help scoping out a An important but time-sensitive project By the end of the call Norcross had cleared his entire weekend and set to work In a conversation I had with Norcross about the project. He said By late Sunday, I realized it was a larger project than any of us imagined, but I don't think I could have lived with myself But I don't think I could have lived with myself if I just said sorry too busy The project as it turned out was a collaboration between the Vera Institute of Justice and New America called the immigrant connection project or ICON. They were building a tool to help attorneys who are working around the clock to reunite these separated families and ensure a due process for all involved From the ICON website ICON is a resource for parents who have been separated from their children due to the administration zero tolerance policy as well as for the attorneys of these parents to locate and connect with the legal service providers working with their children Our boss Chris, he was completely supportive 100% Developing and iterating on our products is is absolutely important. I mean after all that's how we get paid But losing one developer for a week or two to help reunite kids with their families That's a bit more important than shipping something off the road map So Norcross spent the next week or two workdays evenings weekends just completely focused on his work for ICON Ultimately children in around a hundred of these centers Were processed by ICON aiding attorneys and reuniting the families. It's far from everyone But it was absolutely a step in the right direction Another quote from my chat with Norcross Pushing back against the evil you see in the world is more than just punching Nazis I mean that's absolutely an important part But the ultimate act of rebellion is insisting on compassion kindness and grace and what has become a pretty dark world When you talk think about the positive impact of Norcross's work How he was willing to put everything he had in helping these kids that he's never met before he'll likely never meet again That's using software for the greater good. It's using your abilities your skills to make a positive change in the world Maybe you're not dealing with external forces though. Maybe your employer is doing things that just don't feel right Whatever your beliefs, however, you feel However, you twist this you just feel deep in your gut that what they're doing is wrong We don't have to love our jobs, but it's really nice when we're not embarrassed or have to whisper who we work for We're not like I Sincerely hope that everyone in this room has a job that they can be proud of or if not proud of at least Not wake up feeling disgusted by Companies don't always make the best decisions Honestly, that's really putting it lightly, but it doesn't mean that we're bad people for working for them or having them as clients After all warm fuzzies don't put food on the table That doesn't absolve us from responsibility though. If you knew the work you were doing was being used to hurt people Would you still do it? Let's say you produce fencing for a living and someone says hey We need you to build cages so that we can lock up more kids in these detention centers Be okay with that on a lighter note last summer Facebook released an app in the app marketplaces called Onavo protect. It was meant to be a free virtual VPN or free virtual private network or VPN After all being busy 21st century people were all on the go right we don't want to be sitting in a Coffee shop or an airport or a conference and having someone and sitting over in the corner like stealing our passwords So VPNs are awesome. Don't get me wrong But a good VPN needs to keep your data private Kind of in the name virtual private network And I'm not just talking about being private from people on your network But private from the virtual private network service itself logs need to be purged or not kept at all And you certainly shouldn't be paying someone to then just turn around and sniff your traffic Unfortunately a lot of the free or low-cost VPNs They have to make their money somehow so sometimes they do some less than awesome things with our data Onavo protect Was being run by a little company you may have heard of called Facebook? Yeah, that Facebook Let me remind you Facebook's this giant corporation that's made billions by collecting data through Let's say less than honest means I mean in order to sell really targeted advertisement or Adplacements to advertisers if an advertiser wanted to target. Let's say white guys named Steve Within two miles of this building You can bet that Facebook could accommodate that request Facebook is amazing at what they do, but they employ and they employ a lot of great well-meaning people But the core of what Facebook does is collect as much information about you as possible So they launch a novel protect a free VPN to lull people into this false sense of security. Oh great I can go do my banking. I can go communicate with people whatever because I'm on a VPN So it doesn't matter that I'm on a public Wi-Fi network You're on a VPN owned by one of the biggest abusers of online privacy that we've ever seen Worst yet on Alvo protect operates at a lower level the most applications on your phone This isn't just Facebook saying haha We're gonna see everything you do in the Facebook and Instagram apps and don't worry. They do that too, but Because it's a VPN and it's working at a lower level on your phones operating system They can see all of the traffic going through your phone. Are you sending an email? Facebook's aware of it Are you playing words with friends? Facebook sees the traffic? Every API endpoint every URL that's being hit Facebook knows about it So Apple caught on and was like yeah, we're gonna need you to cut this out So Facebook pulled a novel protect, but then this year 2019 news broke that they re-released it as Facebook's research VPN they even went around the The app stores rules by using their enterprise certificate. That's the the thing that allows Companies at the size of like Facebook to say hey, we're going to have an app that people can put on their phones to say Hey, what's for lunch today in the company cafeteria, but not have to distribute So something meant for private internal use they start using this to distribute this invasive VPN to the general public Worse yet, they start offering to pay people to install this so they're literally going sir. May I bug you? Literally, may I intercept all of your traffic? Here's $20 for your trouble. Look at that handsome guy. I Reminded of when I was 18. It was before smartphones, but right as Facebook was getting started So I'll let you do the math Some friends of mine got involved with one of those programs where they go around and they say hey You can get a free t-shirt free Anyone else do that? Yeah So a dumb Free t-shirt in exchange for a credit card that 18 year old Steve absolutely did not need I'll be honest looking back. I can't tell you what the t-shirt said I wore it maybe once or twice if if ever And it was probably just some bad pun because well, that's who I am now and that's why I was then too So I get this t-shirt and I'm I'm home for And my mom my mom is a CFO by the way So my mom my CFO of the mother is like so Steve this credit card showed up with your name on it I'm like, oh Fudge only I also did not say fudge So I'm having this conversation trying to justify why getting a stupid free t-shirt was worth like Wasn't going to use didn't have the money to pay off even if I did use it because again 18 year old Steve Let me tell you that's a conversation I would rather never have again so far so good I Tell you this all to remind you that teenagers don't always make the best decisions I certainly didn't and I'm guessing that you probably made some mistakes in your youth, too So think back to when you were younger if Facebook approached you and said hey We'd like to pay you we want to give you this free VPN. Hell. It's so free. We'll even pay you to install it Would you have taken them up on the offer? I Can tell you that guy would have But Now what if you were on the other side and you were working For Facebook sure developing a Performance easy to install easy to run VPN if people have used VPNs. They know they're not always the most user-friendly thing That could be a really fun challenge. Hey, I'm going to make VPNs more prevalent I'm going to put this out there people are going to be able to be on a VPNs and be secured and it's going to be wonderful and Then you remember. Oh, yeah, Facebook and then you get told how by the way We're going to need you to steal all sorts of data if the terms of service Basically say hey, we're going to let you use this for free But we're going to extract as much data as we possibly can Is that something that you as as a developer as a product manager as a project manager as as an SEO person as a Business person is that something that you can feel comfortable with again Facebook has done a lot for open-source software And it's supposed to have this amazing engineering culture, but that doesn't mean that Facebook's a good company Working for Facebook doesn't make you a bad person either. We're not our companies after all But we have to weigh the good and the bad in what we do and see how our contributions are pushing the needle another company that has a Not so sterling reputation is a little ride-sharing giant called uber In 2017 news of ubers grayball program broke the general idea was essentially to flag users that uber felt had the The wherewithal or the means to Violate or more like or more accurately undermine ubers terms of service The city officials or anyone else who might try to go after uber for any number of Violations would end up getting served a fake version of the app. They'd get fake data fake drivers They'd be like oh, I just can never seem to get an uber. What's going on with this? Now let's be clear This wasn't your friendly neighborhood uber driver just kind of going like yeah, I'm not going to pick up any fairs right now This was something built into the application pushed out from the top to help protect ubers interests The way that uber was flagging people who could you know potentially undermine them was really fascinating though if I'm being honest In an expose by the New York Times. We learned a few ways that uber would flag potential city official They would do some geo fencing around government offices Basically if you were in a government office and you were pretty regularly like opening the app, but then not ordering a ride They figured okay, they're just trying to see if people are around they're doing research on us And they're doing it near a government office So we're going to go ahead and flag them as someone who's probably a government employee Uber would also reportedly look up the financial institutions linked to customers credit cards if your card is tied to a police credit union For example, there's a good chance that you're either a law enforcement officer or you're related to one There's also a good chance that at this time you could not get an uber The expose even revealed that uber would go as far as keeping a catalog of some of the most inexpensive Smartphones available, you know the prepaid stuff you'd get at the grocery store Because cops aren't going to spend big money on expensive burner phones if they're running a sting operation I'll confess from an op sec perspective Reading this was really like oh, that's really cool. Like it sucks that it's really unethical and everything But I mean it's an interesting fun sounding challenge It's like a game of cat and mouse or cops and robbers except I guess in this case You're actually going against the cops which makes it less of like a fun game and more of a criminal racket, but I Can empathize with the developers who thought this would be a great challenge to solve How do we determine what users might fit into each cohort? It's a fun analytical puzzle and it's something that's great For instance, you're trying to serve more relevant content to your users. It's a little different when you're using it to evade law enforcement though And with that kind of profiling algorithm It's not hard to let our imaginations run wild as to like well what groups might they exclude from being able to get an uber next? I'm not going to stand up here and tell you these are bad companies and you shouldn't work for them That's that's not my place and I understand that sometimes we take jobs because That we're not a hundred percent cool with because you know, we need to put food on the table What I would like to do is challenge you to find the good in what you're doing and make sure that the good isn't being outweighed by the bad If you're in a situation where your contributions are being used to cause harm Then I implore you as the good person that you presumably are to make a stand Speaking up or standing your ground against bad actors is rarely easy and I absolutely recognize the irony of me a Middle-class cisgender straight white male standing up here and telling you don't not people push you around It hurts the irony is so sharp it hurts But we can't all just quit our jobs as much as we might like to if you live somewhere where the job market isn't great It can be absolutely terrifying to stand up and say I object to what we're doing again warm fuzzies aren't going to put food on the table So what can we do if we're stuck working for a company that upsets our stomach? How can we find purpose in it? Does the job offer training or educational opportunities that we can use to better our situation? It's not unheard of as Dustin was saying for people to go to conferences Meet new people and then have those connections lead to their next job That is one of the big benefits of going to something like this word camp Remember if I hadn't just bought a house when I met Anna in At South by Southwest I might be living in DC working for three spot right now Are there other good people in the company who you can connect with and learn from the company might not be a good company? But if you're working for someone at the scale of Facebook or Uber chances are they're probably employing some pretty smart people If you're working in marketing for instance, and you have the opportunity to work side along Work alongside people doing you know like big multinational campaigns. That's an amazing learning opportunity take advantage of that Maybe the meaning in what you're doing is the personal growth Yeah, that project was really rough and you know you got reprimanded by your manager or the higher-ups or whatever Because it shipped later it went over budget or whatever but maybe it Was a less than successful launch because you had to dive really deep Like some new technology you've never worked with before and now you can leverage that knowledge and that experience in your next project Or in your next job They say a mistake is only a mistake if you don't learn from it Can the same be said about a bad project? If you're in a bad situation that you can't get out of right now try to find ways to make that bad situation To be clear, I'm 100% absolutely not advocating that you like go steal company secrets or start some rogue Twitter account to you know be a whistleblower. I mean Maybe don't not be a whistleblower with some rogue account because those are a lot of fun to follow but What I'm saying is find a way to make your employment at least mutually beneficial Remember the company is paying for your time and your talents, but the company doesn't own you You can look outside of your company, too Maybe you can't drop the nine-to-five right now, but you have some time outside of work to volunteer Maybe a local nonprofit can use your skills or you can spend some time writing blog posts to help teach other people If I may share a little secret one of the best ways to learn something really well is to have to try to teach it to somebody else It if you've ever been afraid like oh, but I don't have enough experience to do this Try getting up on stage and saying oh, let me pretend to be an expert here You're going to learn that thing really well, so you don't look like an ass That's personally what I do with every one of my my technical talks So please join us after lunch for my my second talk of the day If you're interested in speaking maybe try with your local meet-ups They're often looking for speakers and you'll be able to share what you've learned For groups that are local to you And help those people grow Once you've spoken at a few local meet-ups maybe take that show on the road Employers are often happy to send you to conferences It's it's time away from work, but they get to look like you know progressive thought leaders and you're like time to travel and hang out and it's your name on the marquee at the end of the day if You're looking for a way to get out of your current job Sharing what you know can be a great way to do that it helps put you on other people's radars whether it's blogging or speaking YouTube videos writing from magazines publishing ebooks Being known for being a teacher can open far more doors than most jobs can on their own If teaching is not your thing find some other ways to better yourself Pick up a new skill make some new connections reach out to local user groups and maybe try to get your company to sponsor them I mean after all if Facebook is going to steal like all of our data. They should at least buy us some pizza first, right? So we've learned how to either reframe what we're doing to find the deeper meaning or to jump ship and find something that actually makes a difference Why is this important though? At the most basic level it provides that simple gratification that validation knowing that the time and energy that we've spent hasn't been wasted We've solved somebody's problem. We've we've helped someone go further. We've helped someone go faster We've reduced someone's pain all of those reasons Chris was talking about We've helped somebody do something. We've done something for somebody else. And yes, sometimes that somebody else we can be selfish And yeah, yeah, I helped myself, but a lot of times we're helping other people or a group of people You feel good because your time was spent making the world a better place And that doesn't mean that you can't and shouldn't be compensated for your work But you've applied your skills and your talent to help somebody. That's an amazing feeling, isn't it? Do you want to find purpose in what you do? Maybe try looking beyond your personal life experiences and try to think about how your talents can be used to help somebody else To have empathy is to show understanding of and relate to how other people are feeling If someone's upset, you're there for them with more than just a friendly. Oh, it'll be okay You try to put yourself in their position and understand why they're feeling the way they are Especially before you try to offer advice Maybe something's really easy for you, but other people aren't you In short, empathy is being willing to put other people's problems ahead of your own even just for a moment By taking time to empathize with others, their struggles, their pains You're far more likely to be able to come up with better solutions and better ways to help people because you can see the problem from their perspective If you take everything that you know right now And I don't care if you're a developer, if you're a project manager, if you're a business person, if you're a strategist, whatever Take what you know right now and imagine one of your clients' problems or one of your customers' problems Look at it through the how they would be seeing it, but with the lens of all of the what you know You're able to look at them and you're able to say I Understands how you feel or where you're struggling and here's how I can help They're gonna think you have superpowers because you're able to take your experiences and funnel it through their perspective Empathy also leads to better work How many stories have we heard about some well-meaning app that made it easier for for instance someone to get stalked? Having empathy is looking critically at an idea no matter how good the intentions are and asking How could this be used to hurt someone? If you don't know look around the room Talk about the idea with people who don't share your same life experiences or your privilege and most of all listen to what these people have to say Closely paired with empathy is compassion Doing good for others without expecting anything in return life isn't some business transaction or quid pro quo Sometimes you'll put good out into the world and nothing will come of it, but at the end of the day I don't know about you, but I sleep much better knowing that I've tried my best to make the world a better place rather than just shrug people off Again, I'm not saying you need to go out there and do this stuff for free put your mask on before helping others after all But having a bit of empathy and compassion that can make all of the difference to someone Let's talk about accessibility for a moment. I'm very fortunate in a lot of ways, but Physically I have full mobility full use of my senses heck even my glasses aren't that strong I have no color blindness no dyslexia physically speaking nothing that I could claim as a quote disability Now let's take my right arm away being right-handed That's going to be a hindrance and maybe my left arm isn't great at holding things steady So your click targets better be big enough that I'm not fat fingering cancel every time I try to order a pizza through your app Take away my glasses. I'm not able to read the text Okay, don't blindfold me am I able to navigate your your site your application using assistive technology like a screen reader Now take off the blindfold give me my glasses back, but take away my ability to discern color Am I going to be able to tell at a glance the difference between a major error notification and like a hey? Your thing was updated successfully. Good job type message in your app. Am I going to be able to find the links? If I can't tell black from blue in your body copy Empathy means putting yourself in other people's shoes and seeing what issues they might run into Not everybody is as fortunate as I am But if I build a piece of software that for instance can't be navigated with a keyboard well, that's on me Accessibility isn't a feature and treating it as such is a slap in the face of everyone who can't use your software I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people This was the headline of a story on Huffington Post on June 26th. My dad's birthday 2017 and it captured the feeling that accessibility advocates have been feeling Well forever Caring about other people isn't a weakness. It's not some add-on or premium extra Giving a shit about the people around us should be table stakes if we're building software Creating content or in any way being a part of the society Accessibility matters because empathy matters because people matter never forget that please I suppose what I'm trying to say in all of this is that Ultimately most of the software we write Isn't exactly busting at the seams with purpose If we want to be able to look back at how we've spent our lives We need to recognize this. I don't want to be 80 years old and telling my grandchildren about all of the garbage cheese burgers I helped sell. I don't want to spend 40 hours a week 2000 hours a year Building stuff that doesn't matter So we can find purpose in what we create Think about the the people it employs the mouths it feeds the anguish it relieves the the communities It can help create and support Or we can find something to do that we can be proud of No matter the path we owe it to ourselves as professionals to practice empathy and everything we do If you're not helping somebody in need What are you doing? If I'm meaning in what you do Or find something that does have purpose Either way move forward with empathy again, I really don't like to be cheesy with my message, but We only get one chance at this life We can choose to be a force for good a force for evil or just hang out somewhere in between but I Don't know about all of you But I'd much rather spend my life trying to find a way to put good into the world Then selling garbage or making other people's lives more difficult The software that we write shouldn't be for a company. You're not just writing it to sell more cheeseburgers You're writing software for the people Thank you